Michael Silk

In the opening words of Poetics 22, Aristotle offers a prescriptive formula for poetic lexis: ‘clear but not ordinary’ (σαφῆ καὶ μὴ ταπεινήν). For over two millennia, across the Western languages and literatures, the second half of the formula corresponds with a norm of poetic elevation, more or less, while, in particular, poetic practice and theoretical formulations agree that ‘serious’ poetry should indeed be composed in language that is ‘not ordinary’.

Yet this is far from a straightforward case of classical reception. The fact is that it is most unusual to find discussions of poetic elevation that specifically point to Aristotle’s prescription. Two that do are (in England) Addison’s critique of Milton’s language in 1712 and (in Germany) Klopstock’s reflections on poetic language in 1758 – though even these discussions are oddly inclined to assume the Poetics as much as engage with it. How different, then, from the way that writers and theorists, all the way from Corneille in the seventeenth century to Brecht and Ricoeur in the twentieth, engage directly with Aristotle’s text and the issues it raises. How is this difference to be explained? Why this particular silence during the centuries of general engagement?

Part of the answer, perhaps, is the pervasiveness, from later antiquity to the eighteenth century, of classical rhetorical theory, which in effect incorporates Aristotle’s principle into its own preoccupations with language – but, then again, metaphor figures prominently both in Aristotle’s overall discussion of lexis and in rhetorical theory, and (unlike his lexis formula) Aristotle’s account of metaphor is repeatedly and specifically invoked by literary theorists and others across the centuries. The competing influence of Horace’s Ars Poetica throughout classicising Europe is another possible factor that needs consideration here, while a quite different issue is the seeming reluctance of commentators on Aristotle’s text to find the principle interesting enough to ponder and pursue. In the sixteenth century, Castelvetro (1570/76) is an exception, but there are few others, then or since; and recent commentators on the Poetics are often inclined to hurry past the formula altogether.

Perhaps the most egregious example of indifference to the relevance of Aristotle’s principle involves the innovative literary theorising of the English Romantic era, early in the nineteenth century, in the momentous dispute about poetic language between the poets, and erstwhile friends and collaborators, Wordsworth and Coleridge. Wordsworth is famous, or notorious, for his insistence (1800/02) that ‘there neither is, not can be, any essential difference between the language of prose and metrical composition’, and his proposal that poetry be written in ‘a selection of language really used by men’, as against ‘devices to elevate the style’ and ‘what is usually called poetic diction’; and all this is in effect a flat rejection of Aristotle’s principle, just as Coleridge’s rejoinder (1817) that ‘I write in metre because I am about to use a language different from that of prose’, and that prose, poetry and ‘ordinary conversation’ are three different things, reasserts the principle, albeit in a modified form. Both Wordsworth and Coleridge are classically literate; both of them are happy to cite the Poetics elsewhere; and Coleridge, in particular, is deeply concerned with theory, past and present. Yet neither Wordsworth nor Coleridge ever mentions Aristotle’s formula at all. And it is a similar story in more recent times, when literary Modernism effectively turns its back on poetic elevation in general. T. S. Eliot (himself equivocal about elevation) is a significant witness here.

Whatever the explanation, we have here a revealing case study for the understanding of ‘reception’ itself. Principles can be absorbed and assumed, modified or rejected, with or, as here, without specific engagement. For more than two millennia of subsequent theory, and indeed practice, Aristotle’s principle has the effective status of an archetype (as at least one recent theorist, Derek Attridge, has in effect indicated – albeit not in terms that I find satisfactory). Archetypes, however, are surely a matter for the classical tradition rather than for ‘reception’ in the strict sense. (On the distinction, cf. Silk, Gildenhard and Barrow, The Classical Tradition: Art, Literature, Thought, 2014: 4–5, 11–13, 251–85.)